The Stack

Wizardry IV is the one remaining episode of the series that I’ve played before, and played through to completion, back when I was in college, a few years after its 1987 release. I had skipped over II and III because the premise of IV felt more interesting: it’s the role-reversal episode, putting the player in the role of Werdna, the evil wizard from the first game. Unable to truly kill him, Trebor had his body thrown into a crypt in the lower reaches of a dungeon patrolled by adventurers. When he awakens, weakened from his death, he calls upon his monster allies to help him escape and reclaim the amulet that he and Trebor have been squabbling over all this time.

I had been undecided about whether to call Werdna “evil” above — as far as I can tell, he’s never actually called that in Wizardry I, and the intro text in the Wiz1 manual only describes him as “fanatical”. Really, the only thing suggesting that he’s evil in that game is that he’s hanging out with a bunch of vampires when you kick in the door to his sanctum, and I can imagine good reasons for that. And sure, he stole this amulet from Trebor, but remember that Trebor is called “the Mad Overlord” — not necessarily someone you’d trust with a powerful magical artifact. Anyway, Wizardry IV settles the question right off the bat: the very first sentence is “You are Werdna, the evil wizard.” The intro text in the manual, which is much longer and much better-written than that of the previous episodes, reinforces this by talking about your plans for world domination once you’ve got the amulet back. But it also solidifies our doubts about Trebor, and establishes that he doesn’t have much more claim to the amulet than you do: Trebor and Werdna learned how to get it at more or less the same time, and Trebor beat Werdna to the punch by mere hours.

The viewpoint of the writing carries over into the game, as well: for the first time, we’re getting narration of internal thoughts, like “With a feeling of triumph, you exclaim ‘Free at last!'”, rather than just physical descriptions of the environment. It’s a significant change to the feel of the thing. This game is unlike the other Wizardries up to this point, and not in just the obvious ways.

In fact, according to some of the online resources I’ve looked at while blogging the series, it isn’t even really part of the same series. It’s claimed that the initial Wizardry continuity, the “Llylgamyn saga”, consists of Wizardries 1, 2, 3, and 5, but not 4. This seems strange to me — 4 is a lot more closely connected to 1 than 2 and 3 are. It’s hard to imagine a hard criterion for excluding 4 from the series that doesn’t also exclude 1, or a criterion for including 1 that doesn’t apply to 4 as well. Perhaps it’s because it’s the one episode that wasn’t released in Japan — a lot of the jokes and some of the puzzles rely on untranslatable wordplay and pop culture references. ¹Update: On looking into it further, it looks like what they really mean is that 4 has been left out of various anthology releases for consoles. Which means the translatability issues are probably the main underlying reason. Or perhaps it’s just down to character portability — you can’t import characters into Wiz4, because the only character you can play is Werdna. It could have been fun to import characters so you could encounter them as enemies, though.

That’s one of the notable things about the game, in contrast to the previous episodes: All the enemies are individuals, with unique names, forming a roster similar to the player character roster elsewhere. Your own minions, meanwhile, are nameless, just as they’ve always been. In general, the game is impressively dedicated to turning all the asymmetries of the system backwards, rather than just reskinning it all. Previously, monsters approached you in up to four homogeneous groups; here, you can summon up to three groups of monsters at a time, with Werdna himself occupying the fourth slot. Up to six individual adventurers attack you at a time, and you can only do hand-to-hand attacks against the first three. It even displays the exact same combat UI as the previous games, with the monsters on top and the adventuring party on the bottom, and you have to get used to the idea that the top is your guys now.

Notably, though, this design means you don’t control what your monsters do in battle. They just pick at random from their action set, like monsters have always done. The way you exercise control is by choosing which monsters to summon in the first place. The most essential puzzle in the game is just “How do I make an effective team out of the monster types available to me?” The monsters are all things that appeared in the first three games, and at the beginning of the game, when you don’t have access to the really powerful ones yet, they’re all things you’re used to seeing slaughtered in droves.